Materialistic theories of mind and brain

Abstract

The chapter discusses three main issues of the mind-body problem as discussed by materialistic physicians and philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: (1) The question of how to conceptualize matter that was capable of sensing, feeling, and thinking. Examining the positions of La Mettrie, Diderot and Maupertuis in France and of Priestley in Britain, the chapter shows the main alternatives that were considered. (2) The question of whether the human soul is a function of the body or an immaterial substance and, related to this, the ideologically highly charged question of whether the human soul is mortal or immortal. (3) The physiological and anatomical research undertaken in this period. The chapter shows in this way that the materialistic denial of the existence of an immaterial soul had an important general impact on the sciences (especially physiology and anatomy). At the same time, developments in the life sciences of the eighteenth century and the then emerging notion of organized matter allowed a far more subtle handling of the mind-body problem than before.